Wow, that's surprising. I'm an immigrant in NYC, where my own family isn't happy that I'm even vegetarian and some restaurants in Brighton Beach (a neighborhood primarily of Soviet immigrants) have nothing vegetarian on the menu. I have heard that the immigrant community in New York is frozen in time, maintaining the culture of the Soviet Union while the countries of their birth have changed significantly. I wonder if that's true in this context.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean, in the middle of a war, especially a defensive war, pragmatism is going to override a lot, and providing soldiers with meals that align with their preferred diets wherever possible is going to avoid a big hit to morale over making one eat things that they have some ethical or religious objection to, so it makes sense to do

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That's how many 21st century Americans think, but not how I expected Ukrainians to think. I was raised to eat what I was given, and when I became a vegetarian my family thought I was being ridiculous and even mildly offensive. My grandfather would tell me how people could only have moral objections to food because they had never been hungry. I'm sure he would have said "pragmatism" meant that a soldier eats whatever is edible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

In a sense pragmatism would mean that a soldier eats whatever they can, given that generally, people will do things they find objectionable rather than starve, if one was talking about the individual soldiers being pragmatic. However, what I was referring to was the state or military leadership being pragmatic here, because even if your soldiers will eat rations they object to, they're probably not going to like it, and one can't so easily pragmatically decide to like something. So even if your soldiers dutifully eat whatever they're given regardless of if they'd object to doing so given a reasonable choice, it's still going to hurt morale and therefore hurt their ability to carry out their objectives. Not really arguing with you here obviously, just responding to that hypothetical response you were suggesting someone might give.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

People who emigrated from the Soviet Union often disagreed with its social policy and general way of life. They were more fans of capitalism/individualism as they imagined it, over the Soviet system. This is reflected not just in lifestyle but in politics too, they are a Republican stalwart in a deeply democratic area. I wouldn't count on them "maintaining Soviet culture".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

When I said "Soviet culture" I was referring to the way people behave in their daily lives, not to their political beliefs (although my impression is that even the few communist true-believers left at the end were still culturally much more similar to other Soviet immigrants than to Americans).